Watching "Training Day," which as the title illustrates takes
place during a single 24-hour period, reminded me of my first day
of teaching in a New York City high school. Antoine Fuqua
("Bait," "The Replacement Killers") gives us one
intense police dramas with the marvelous Denzel
Washington's going increasingly over the top in the role of rogue
detective Alonzo Harris. Though everything appears to hit the
fan about a half hour into the picture, Fuqua calibrates the
potent story of David Ayer ("The Fast and the Furious") so that
we can overlook the lurid and contrivance-soaked conclusion and
leave the theater with the feeling that maybe the cops who are
good guys can really defeat the forces of iniquity.

The story starts off with a patient exposition showing us that
perhaps Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) is not choir-boy idealistic
despite his conviction that drug pushers are the scum of L.A. and
that he has a calling to rid his city of them. His wife had recently
given birth, they're living in a cramped apartment, and he wants
to be promoted to detective in order to move his family to a more
capacious house. You can see Hoyt's opening-day tensions as
he reluctantly drags himself out of bed, talks to his prospective
mentor Alonzo on the phone peppering his answers with "sir,"
and sits dumfounded in the morning coffee-shop rendezvous with
his new boss as Alonzo focuses on the newspaper and dresses
down his new acolyte for speaking and ruining his concentration.

Yet Jake is in awe of the big man, all the more as he watches
Alonzo traipse around his broad geographical precinct like a
warlord ruling over his serfs. The expression "what a difference
a day makes" hits home for young, ambitious and naive Jake as
the song title has probably not quite succeeded in doing to
anyone else with such furor. As Jake follows his boss' lead to
some extent, using a choke hold on one of two pond scum
people in an L.A. back alley who are in the processing of raping a
fourteen-year-old girl, Alonzo himself ups the ante in dealing with
some of the higher-ups in the drug trade, with corrupt
apparatchiks in local government including a fierce,
cigar-smoking D.A. (Harris Yulin), and in scaring the
hell out of some college kids slumming by driving through
the ghetto to buy marijuana.

As Alonzo hones in the worst of L.A. citizenry, I'd be curious to
know what various denizens of the America theater audience.
Would they cheer this direct, extra-legal action, a kind of the-end-
justifies-the-means philosophy as they did while Charles
Bronson's character in Michael Wiener's "Death Wish" did in
offing muggers on the subway rather than bothering to arrest
them and take his chances on justice before a jury? After all
Denzel Washington is awfully persuasive as one of our finest
actors, perfectly able to play the good guy as he did in as a
coach in "Remember the Titans," as a South African activist,
Steven Biko, in "Cry Freedom" and once more in a fiery
supporting performance in "Glory." Though his role this time
does not call for the complexity he demonstrated while the
incarnation of Malcolm X in the film of that name, he does a
smashing job in his most villainous role. Ethan Hawke, recently
performing in the title role of the indecisive prince in Michael
Almereyda's "Hamlet," pulls off a role not entirely dissimilar.
Rather than refuse illegal orders of his new boss, such as the
command that he smoke a crack pipe loaded with PCP and wash
away the illusions with a few beers, he hesitates, then, thinking of
the new house he will get down the road, he follows the
directives.

There's an unfortunate tendency to end action-adventure
pictures with extreme, Bonnie-and-Clyde violence. In Jonathan
Mostow's "Breakdown," Red Barr (J.T. Walsh) is done in by
having a truck thrown on him by Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell) and
more recently a bad guy is buried alive in "Don't Say a Word." A
similar concluding scene threatens to destroy the quality of what
went on before. But thanks to a stellar, riveting performance by
Denzel Washington in a villainous role that so many actors would
kill for and a remarkable show by Ethan Hawke as his bland foil,
"Training Day" is an action police drama which is as good as a
Hollywood genre pic can get.